Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  She is at the breaking point, and there’s still the neurotic exchange with Clive, the powerful, treacherous bond with Vanessa. No one else loves her, and she mourns Thoby: “It is just two years since he died, and I feel immensely old, and as though the best in us had gone. But what use is it to write? It is such an odd life without him.”69

  The work will take over, even in this limbo. And spitefulness. Vanessa’s difficulties become public, under the pretext of a role-playing game through letters, no doubt invented by the malicious Lytton: some friends, Lady Ottoline Morrell and her husband, Philip, Hilton Young, Walter Lamb and Clive, Virginia and Lytton, among others, play imaginary characters whose letters will supposedly form a novel. Vanessa plays Clarissa. And here is Eleanor Hardyng (Virginia) responding to Mr. Hatherly (Lytton): “So you’ve noticed it then? How clever you are, and how unkind! For don’t you think that these ‘extraordinary conclusions’ you like so much may be rather uncomfortable … for Clarissa? We were not happy—no—and yet I know its dangerous to imagine people in love with one … I don’t admit for a moment that you have any real ground for your ‘extraordinary conclusions,’ and I suppose I should do better to say no more about them. You always tempt me to run on, and justify myself and explain myself, with your hints and subtleties and suggestive catlike ways.”70 Bloomsbury must be abuzz with gossip.

  All the more so because Vanessa (Clarissa), through this other name, dares to let her distress surface and complains to Eleanor what she keeps silent about to Virginia:

  Dearest Eleanor … I never get you at first hand now; it is always through James [Clive] that I have to find out how you are behaving & his accounts cannot be taken too literally. You seemed to have seen a great deal of him lately … it is late at night & James [Clive] has deserted me. He said he was going to see Roger [Hilton Young] & might look in on you on the way. So I shall perhaps hear of you from him—as usual.71

  But the bond between Virginia and Clive is weakening. Virginia is persuaded to accompany her sister and brother-in-law to Florence. Her opportunity for a tantalizing letter:

  Why should I excite you? Why should you be glad to hear that I and my bundle of tempers come with you to Italy? Ah, how pleasant a world, where such facts do exist! how exquisite that you should recognise them. When I have melted down the whole of my illusions, one or two things remain, bright as gold, or diamond. One is—well, that you care for me, and that we are likely to spend many years in the same neighbourhood.72

  Virginia’s “bundle of tempers” wins out nevertheless. The trip, Florence friends, the city itself, its atmosphere depress her. Clive—avenging himself for not going beyond flirting with her?—acts the loving husband toward his wife. Arguments ensue. Virginia feels excluded, jealous, and decides to return to London. Vanessa’s opportunity to reestablish the “Clarissa” version and to sigh sweetly to a friend: “It was rather melancholy to see her start off on that long journey alone leaving us together here! Of course I am sometimes impressed by the pathos of her position & I have been more so here than usual. I think she would like very much to marry & certainly she would like much better to marry Lytton than anyone else. It is difficult living with Adrian who does not appreciate her & to live with him till the end of their days is a melancholy prospect. I hope some new person may appear in the course of the next year or two for I have come to think that in spite of all the drawbacks she had better marry. Still I don’t know what she would do with children!”73 Already!

  Yes, everything seems to have cooled off, evolved. Except the attachment, troubled as it is, between Virginia and Vanessa. Who falls in love with Roger Fry, desperately in love … which revives Clive’s interest in his wife, cooling his interest in Virginia. That’s the end of the trio. Leonard will soon return from Ceylon.

  The few years she shares with Roger would be the most fulfilled time of Vanessa’s life. Thirteen years her senior, Roger was completely hers. A man of rare energy, an engaged scholar, a rather academic painter himself but a critic for the prestigious avant-garde; the first exhibition of postimpressionist painters that he organized in London introduces Van Gogh and Cézanne to England (“There are 6 apples in the Cézanne picture. What can 6 apples not be?” muses Virginia) as well as Matisse and Picasso, among others. He becomes the enthusiastic mentor and lover of a self-assured, flourishing Vanessa: “Oh Roger, how horribly I want you…. You seem to know so exactly what I want, physically and mentally. How do you do it? Being with you is like being on a river and being with most people is like driving a jibbing horse along a bumpy road.” And she uses the same metaphor as she did with Clive: “Oh Roger, it was delicious today in spite of sordid surroundings, like a little water when one was very thirsty.”74

  With all his good taste and talent for living, Clive accepts the situation, very agreeably. When Vanessa writes to him or to Roger, each man adds a cheerful postscript to the letter. She is relaxed, all anxiety has left her, all resentment, and her letters to her husband, often cold until then, become tender: she courts him, it is she who flirts now, wanting to keep him around, close by, wanting there to be no rupture, but a friendship, a lasting affection and, for her, for their children, some kind of priority. Detached from him, she now makes the demands she refrained from, trying to secure him within a lifestyle that, in the end, suits her husband very well and corresponds marvelously to the Bloomsbury style, where affection always outlives intimacy. Where one remains close, faithful beyond all the torments suffered. At present she risks: “Do you really miss your Dolph, my legitimate male? … Shall you all be glad to see me next week … ?” She insists: “Are you fond of me?”, a letter at the end of which Roger describes to Clive the latest of Vanessa’s endearing blunders, for which she has a talent.75

  It will take her a few years to grow weary not of Roger Fry, who is indispensable to her (despite his anguish, he remained her confidant), but of the demanding love he bears for her. And most importantly, Duncan Grant, such a regular until then, enters the stage as a new character. Adrian leaves Duncan, and Nessa tries to console him over the rupture with her brother. Thus blossoms Nessa’s undying passion for him, though her sexual life almost immediately and permanently comes to an end, since Duncan will put a stop to any intercourse of this kind with her. Without ever projecting it, without Virginia ever guessing it, Vanessa Bell thus becomes another symbol for the lament: “to want and want and not to have.”76

  The limits of proud Vanessa’s combativeness, despite her former rebellion against her father, her obstinacy in preserving everything, hiding her wounds and yielding when vanquished, surface in the face of Clive and Virginia’s betrayal, as does her tendency to suffer without breaking or losing anything. Her silent withdrawals, her resignation will become the secret keys to her existence, without ever diminishing her aura. That part of her nature will remain unknown to her circle, even (and especially) to Virginia. A mute pride will make her conceal all humiliation. Secret, unknown to others, she will appear to be following a perfectly obvious itinerary.

  Sensual being that she is, she will submit, suffer the torture of begging, of being denied sexual intercourse, and by the most desirable and desired of men. Desiring him physically, desiring him in vain, she will no longer consider anyone else. But at the cost of a thousand humiliations, and often anguished, always anxious, she will manage to retain Duncan’s (mutually) delightful presence for life.

  Their life will be linked to Charleston, the home she created, luminous, full of work, sensual richness, fertile disorder, and proclaimed freedom. But Nessa’s existence will be based on frustration, a castration she masochistically asks for, almost demanding to be scorned, deferent, anxious (and loved), and ready to do anything to avoid losing Duncan, which will never happen.

  Everyone sees her as dominant, vital, sexual, and liberated, professional, surrounded by men she loves and has loved and who remain, even with one another, dear close friends. No one will leave her, except through death.

  Clive, as we have seen,
remains her husband and becomes the official father of Angelica, Duncan’s daughter: the proprieties given a passing nod! They will gather regularly in London and Clive joins her at Charleston, where he sometimes resides, for a long time accompanied by Mary Hutchinson, receiving regular visitors, the Woolfs, Adrian, Maynard Keynes (much later with his wife, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova), or Dora Carrington, Lytton and other Stracheys, many mutual friends, often the same ones as at Rodmell, which is perhaps less grand and worldly, but more relaxed. And then Roger Fry, heartbroken, but later with Helen Anrep, his new companion. Julian, Quentin, and Angelica will be at the center of all events. And Duncan, who participates with such ease and grace in all the activities and who dances, disguises himself, disputes, enchants, loves them all, those whose lover he has been as well, among them Lytton, Maynard, and Adrian.

  All their lives, Nessa and Duncan paint together, each of them absorbed in their bold investigations; Duncan already famous in England, Vanessa quite well known, admiring him, considering him superior—wrongly. Encouraged and nurtured by Leslie, she has been devoted to her future as a painter since childhood. All her life she will work, think about, dedicate herself to her vocation. She and Duncan were among the very first English painters to accept both the figurative image and abstraction, little concerned about the boundaries between them. Though different from one another, their works belong to the same family. Boldly constructed, Vanessa’s canvases express the inexorable solitude of a nude woman, of grouped figures, objects, abstract compositions, fixed each time in an insurmountable isolation to which she holds the key. A calm, distant, inflexible violence, often very captivating, and which belongs to her.

  Negligently beautiful, heavier than Virginia, less quick and nervous, more practical, Vanessa, often provocative, saucy, even coarse, always maternal, will live surrounded by her own, by calm, gaiety, trivial uproars, deep friendships.

  And all her life, she will struggle in secret, humble and terrified, deprived of the sexuality that is intrinsic to her. Willing at every moment, ready to bear anything, even to provoke anything so that Duncan Grant will not go to live elsewhere with one of his lovers. Lovers whom she often tries to keep under her own roof.

  After having obtained his necessary consent, it is with David (Bunny) Garnett that she first shares Duncan. A trio, once again! But real, immediate; they live together. Later, pregnant by Duncan at her request, she fears Bunny’s reaction (which will be favorable) and not Clive’s, who encouraged her and will become the official father.

  World War I is approaching. David Garnett is twenty-six years old. He is then writing his first work, Turgenev, which would appear in 1917. Five years later, then completed detached from the trio, he would become famous with a novel: Lady Into Fox.

  He prefers women, has already flirted with Lytton, Maynard, and others; heterosexuality is more natural to him. With Duncan? He is his lover, they love each other.

  With World War I under way, and both of them conscientious objectors, they are able, thanks to Vanessa’s maneuverings, to work for the state in the orchards near Charleston, but also in Wissett and in Suffolk, and it is there, in a house without electricity or telephone, that Vanessa gives birth to Angelica.

  Angelica. Born the first Christmas of peacetime, in 1918. After her birth, or even since her conception, demanded by Nessa, no further sexual ties between her parents; Duncan decreed it. Henceforth her mother will have no more sexual ties with anyone, and she is thirty-nine years old.

  Two sisters, two of the most liberated women of their time, unbelievably beautiful, are united in exile, deprivation, the denial of their bodies, decided by two men. To all appearances, at least.

  At Lytton Strachey’s death, Duncan and Vanessa will fall into each other’s arms and will hold each other in a long embrace, sobbing together. The only time, their daughter will remark, when she ever saw them so physically close!

  Until she was sixteen years old, Angelica believed she was Clive Bell’s daughter, whose name she bore. Before an alarmed Virginia, she happened one day to refer to her real father, with whom she lived and whom she loved very much, as “Mr. Grant.”

  She was unaware of all the circumstances that surrounded her arrival into the world, to the point of marrying … Bunny, without knowing that he was her father’s lover, with whom her mother shared Duncan at the time of her birth, when all three lived together as a threesome.

  Above all, she didn’t know that upon discovering her, a newborn in her cradle, Bunny had written to Lytton, “I think of marrying it; when she is twenty I shall be 46—will it be scandalous?”77

  He does marry her.

  In the interim, he marries Rachel Marshall and becomes a father.

  But beyond Angelica’s beauty and youth, what attracts him is the link to the past, to the trio he, Nessa, and Duncan formed at Wissett and Charleston, which haunts him still. Something remained unresolved for him, entangled; some bewitchment, some bitterness.

  Horrified, Duncan and Vanessa tried to prevent the marriage, but without daring to reveal the past to their daughter. Bunny, who had never stopped seeing them, was once again part of their intimacy. What revenge, what somnambulant reprisals was Angelica the object of? Hoodwinked, what stake did she represent?

  Angelica Garnett would have four daughters by Bunny.

  She would be a painter and sculptor, and … wounded.

  Duncan and Bunny? Their love affair twenty years earlier? It lasted five stormy years, interrupted by scenes of jealousy and despair on one side or the other. Nessa was not the cause, but rather outside rivals (or rival). It was Vanessa who would calm and console the two men—which often became her role between Duncan and his partners, and served her well in maintaining her place at Duncan’s side.

  Between Bunny and Nessa, a latent war: Bunny, attracted, desires her in bed; she rebuffs him; he resents her.

  Duncan feels guilty to the point of writing to Bunny: “I am ashamed she should be so fond of me and you are fonder of me than I deserve and I must just abjectly love both of you.”78

  But he adjusts, plays one against the other. In his personal diary, regarding a not yet pregnant Vanessa: “I copulated on Saturday with her with great satisfaction to myself physically. It is a convenient way the females of letting off one’s spunk and comfortable. Also the pleasure it gives is reassuring. You don’t get this dumb misunderstanding body of a person who isn’t a bugger. That’s one for you Bunny!”79 Duncan isn’t always so serious….

  For Virginia, Bunny’s presence at Charleston seems completely natural. “My visit to Charleston was spent mostly in sitting in the drawing [room] & talking to N. [Vanessa] … Duncan wandered in & out; sometimes digging a vegetable bed, sometimes painting a watercolor of bedroom china, pinned to a door. In the evening there was the lumpish Bunny, inclined to be surly; & N. inclined to take him up sharply.” Or that enchanting evening spent with them, despite “the rather obtuse barrier of poor Bunny.” Unwell, he finally goes to bed, “without sympathy from Nessa, who had often put him to bed, she said, for no perceivable cause.”80

  She says this in Virginia’s presence. But within the trio, Vanessa remains dependent on Garnett, afraid that he will leave with Duncan; to keep him around, she admits that he is indispensable to her, as are her companion’s future lovers. Here she is imploring, entangled in a disagreement with Bunny and apologizing for herself in apologizing to Duncan:

  One other perhaps gloomy subject I must write to you about because I’ve been thinking and thinking about it—this difficulty with Bunny…. All I want to tell you is that I think that I behaved very badly and stupidly. I will write and tell him so … having thought about it all, I do understand why I think I felt as I did. It wasn’t that he was on my nerves or that I was jealous of him. I think I can simply forget about it all and there’s no reason for all this bother. I can behave ordinarily and as usual when we meet and I see that if it hadn’t been for other bothers I could have done so before. Please don’t mind
my telling you about it…. My bear, don’t be severe with me for writing you a gloomy letter.* (*Not that I expect you to be). You know I’m really cheerful as a rule.81

  But Duncan is not so complex and notes, for example, in his diary:

  Last night Bunny and Nessa had a terrific conversation over my body after supper, about my jealousy and the treatment of it…. But at the end I only felt increased affection and respect for Nessa…. She spoke about me so much as I should have myself had I dared to defend myself, that I left everything in her hands…. We all discussed later whether our high opinion of a rival made us more or less jealous. Nessa thought the higher the opinion the greater the jealousy with which I later agreed. She produced Virginia of whom she has been more jealous than anyone at a time when she admired her more than any woman she knew.82

  Thus Vanessa reveals what she silently endured in Clive’s time, and to what extent she is able to stifle, to internalize, her suffering. She also indicates, perhaps, the source of her masochistic obsession, how she needs obstacles, torments, rivalry to obtain the satisfaction of not obtaining, of preserving and maintaining the presence of a permanent rejection, a persistent denial of her desire. And from then on, she is obstinately and endlessly focused on this desire—that is, on the presence of Duncan Grant, maintained in the fullness of his companionship and the severity of his rejection.

  Roger Fry, entirely available, never stood a chance.

  And it is Duncan, diverted, so gentle, used to being courted, loved, and possessing a loving nature himself, quick to be amused, to take pleasure in everything, fickle, but above all centered on his art—it is Duncan, accustomed to dejection, to problems of love and morality, and desired by everyone, who becomes in fact … Vanessa’s prey. Anxiously he asks himself:

  I am so uncertain of my real feeling to V that I am utterly unable to feign more than I feel when called upon to feel much, with the consequence that I seem to feel less than I do. I suppose the only thing lacking in my feelings to her is passion. What of that there might be seems crushed out of me, by a bewildering suffering expectation of it (hardly conscious) by her. I think I feel that if I showed any, it would be met by such an avalanche that I should be crushed. All I feel I can do in this case is to build slowly for her a completely strong affection on which she can lean her weary self.83